Annika Dukes displays her collection of cassette tapes at her home in Richmond, Calif., on Saturday, April 12, 2008. Many of the recordings were specialized mixes that she created.
Photo by Paul Chinn / San Francisco Chronicle

Photo: Paul Chinn, SFC

Annika Dukes displays her collection of cassette tapes at her home...

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###Live Caption:Annika Dukes displays her collection of cassette tapes at her home in Richmond, Calif., on Saturday, April 12, 2008. Many of the recordings were specialized mixes that she created.
Photo by Paul Chinn / San Francisco Chronicle###Caption History:Annika Dukes displays her collection of cassette tapes at her home in Richmond, Calif., on Saturday, April 12, 2008. Many of the recordings were specialized mixes that she created.
Photo by Paul Chinn / San Francisco Chronicle###Notes:Annika Dukes###Special Instructions:MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOGRAPHER AND S.F. CHRONICLE/NO SALES - MAGS OUT

The death of the cassette tape seems like one of society's smaller problems right now, right up there with the discontinuation of the Ford Taurus and the cancellation of "Charmed."

Music cassettes were always hard to love. Tapes got ruined when you spilled stuff on them, they never sounded as good as vinyl or CDs, they broke easily and it was almost impossible to do drugs off them. But even as cassettes disappear and blank tapes become impossible to find at the biggest retailers, the recording medium still deserves a proper funeral. The death of the cassette tape also means the death of the mix tape, and that's something worth mourning.

Music compilations are more popular than ever, in part because of the ease of getting the songs you want to the people you care about. On your own or with sites such as Muxtape.com, you can click a mouse 20 or 30 times and create and share your audio files with whomever you want. But as the process gets easier, the gesture becomes emptier as well. Music compilations forwarded by e-mail are only slightly less personal than that Hillary Clinton joke you forwarded to 50 friends. ("Gee, thanks. You spent three minutes on me.") By the sheer effort that went into each one, every cassette mix tape was a big declaration - of love, friendship or even anger. A mix tape was an event.

For myself, when I was a teenager, a mix tape meant hope. I may not have been the smartest, wealthiest or best-looking kid at my high school, but I lived with the belief that there was a perfect song sequence on a 90-minute Memorex tape that could solve any romantic problem. The fact that this almost never worked didn't sway this belief. It just made me choose songs more carefully, buy more expensive tapes and mess with the fade a little more. (Nearly every mix tape I made in the early 1990s had huge amounts of fade, so every song began and ended like Limahl's "The Never Ending Story.")

The biggest advantage of making a mix cassette tape was that it almost always forced the creator to hear each song. Using your computer to create mix CDs without listening to the music is like grabbing five random items at the grocery store - a pomegranate, a box of Frosted Mini-Wheats, a half pound of mahi-mahi, Totino's Pizza Rolls and a package of Hostess SnoBalls - and expecting to cook a delicious meal. It's almost impossible to know that the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" transitions perfectly into Hüsker Dü's version of "Eight Miles High" until you actually hear it.

There's a merit to picking a bunch of your favorite songs for a friend to listen to, but if you really want to impress or seduce, those songs need to tell a story. And the best way to do that has always been a mix tape. I made copies of most of the tapes I gave to love interests in high school and the beginning of college, and digging through these relics in my tape collection reveals more about my past than any yearbooks, photos or letters.

My earliest mix tapes were time-consuming affairs, created by taping songs off the radio. Listening to them is painful, and not just because of the musical selections that would butt Ray Parker Jr.'s "Ghostbusters" against Van Halen's "Jump" followed by the Cars' "Drive." I must have spent days on each one, waiting for whatever KFRC DJ had the night shift to play the latest hit from Foreigner - and then throwing the whole thing away if he talked too much over the song.

At some point in the mid-1980s, I gained stereo privileges, allowing me to tape records from my parents' hi-fi system, and also bought a boom box with a dual cassette tape recorder. This was like discovering the internal combustion engine and the factory assembly line on the same weekend. Suddenly I could create tapes that sounded infinitely better, and then mass produce them with only minor degradation in quality.

In the early 1990s, I inherited my sister's stereo, which is still in operation in my basement. With volume control, high-speed tape-to-tape recording and the blessed fade dial, I was a state-of-the-art mix-tape factory. I lived knowing that if I ever was struck mute, I could still communicate by song. A tape with lots of Otis Redding and "Stardust"-era Willie Nelson means we should go out sometime. A tape with Phil Collins' "Against All Odds" followed by Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" means we're breaking up.

At some point in the early 2000s, I bought a CD burner and started making mix CDs, which I mostly gave away as Christmas gifts. But the dream was over, even though I didn't know it at the time. I would rush them out, doing crazy and reckless things like following "Do They Know It's Christmas?" by Band Aid with "Last Christmas" by Wham. All of it was just a little off, like an Oakland Raiders football team with a dozen high-priced stars that still finishes at the bottom of the league because of bad coaching and no chemistry. After four years of that, I quit for good.

An era is gone. But we still have our tapes, and we still have our stories. Accompanying this article are four classic mix-tape stories, sent in by Chronicle readers. You can contribute your own tale at the SFGate.com parenting blog, the Poop, or send your letters to Sunday Datebook Editor Sue Adolphson at sadolphson@sfchronicle. com.

READER RESPONSE

For a story about the mix-tape revival Web site Muxtape.comwith our Mix Tape Song Hall of Fame, and to share your own mix-tape stories, check out today's post on the Poop, The Chronicle's parenting blog, at www.sfgate.com/blogs/parenting.